Mark Shuttleworth is trying to entice OpenSUSE developers to join Ubuntu. "Novell's decision to go to great lengths to circumvent the patent framework clearly articulated in the GPL has sent shockwaves through the community. If you are an OpenSUSE developer who is concerned about the long term consequences of this pact, you may be interested in some of the events happening next week as part of the Ubuntu Open Week."

It is not necessarily illegal. It depends on how the linking happens. _If_ the binary blob links to the wrapper it's illegal, but if it's the wrapper that links to the binary blob it'll be perfectly legal.

And distributing the binary blob along side the kernel is under no circumstances illegal, if the blob hasn't been installed. One could download the driver-package from nVidia, put it on an install-cd and unpack the driver during installation. In that case it will be perfectly legal, since the source wrapper hasn't been compiled yet, and the binary blob links to nothing.